A temporal perspective on repeated ties across university-industry R&D consortia

•Divergent time norms constitute a central barrier to cross-sectoral collaborations.•This results in distinct timing of repeated collaboration: parallel vs. sequential.•Industry partners seek to compress time, university partners to extend it.•Organizations can shift the time focus by strategically timing repeated ties. Divergent time norms between participating organizations constitute a central barrier to cross-sectoral collaborations. We unpack this tension by studying two distinct time-utilization strategies of university and industry in 1845 R&D consortia. The paper shows that collaborating organizations that are subject to divergent time norms can shift the time focus in their favor through the strategic timing of repeated ties. If university-industry consortia are repeated, this repetition tends to take place either at the beginning of the consortium (parallel timing) or at the end (sequential timing) but typically not in the middle. Industry partners seek to “compress time” by working on different consortia in parallel and therefore want to repeat a collaboration early, whereas universities seek to “extend time” through sequential timing of consortia, i.e., repeat a collaboration at the end or after a consortium has ended. We provide a qualitative substantiation of the identified time-utilization strategies and show that both options coexist in multipartner consortia.